Today I’m thrilled to share a guest post from Tara Gentile on a topic that seems to be coming up a lot lately – moving beyond perfectionism.
When it comes to making a profit, perfection generally doesn’t get you more dollars in your bank account. Quality counts but perfection is overrated.
What counts is execution. You need to release a product to sell it.
Megan is very found of quoting Seth Godin:
Prototype & ship. Prototype & ship.
What the heck does that mean to you? What you create doesn’t matter if you don’t put it out there. All the ideas, functions, techniques, and materials in the world are meaningless unless someone can work with them, touch them, experience them.
In this way, art & software have few differences. So allow me to venture into the world of tech for a minute to illustrate this.
Striving for Enough
It’s been just over a year since the iPad was announced to the world. I got mine in June and I’m thrilled to pieces with it. I will be in line to buy an iPad 2 when it comes out.
Megan will probably be in line with me.
The iPad 2 has lots of rumored features – like a camera (maybe 2!), a speaker, a clearer display, faster performance, etc… None of these features are due to advances in technology. Apple didn’t get better at making iPads over the last year.
Mr. Jobs could have green-lighted any of these features for the first incarnation of the iPad. But he didn’t.
Even over the course of the last year, new features have been added – multitasking, new app features, improvements to iBooks. Sure, new lines of code had to be written but Apple could have opted to include these in the first round.
It’s left many scratching their heads.
Why would Apple leave these things out? Why would they produce such an obviously (really?) flawed product?
Of course, for every person scratching his head about the lack of features, there’s a die-hard iPad user not remembering why she didn’t think she’d need one in the first place.
#thatwouldbethisgirl
Why?
Apple is smart. And sexy…
And they knew that a product that functions beautifully – even if simply – is better than a product with bells & whistles.
Opting out of including advanced functions & features allows you to test whether the most simple design will resonate with a customer. Leaving things out allows you to create something that people just have to have but always want more of.
Apple produced something imperfect and in its imperfection, changed personal computing.
Once the design was a hit, they realized they didn’t have to work on the basics anymore. Now attention could turn to features, whistles, and bells. Updates could be made. Gadgets added.
The jump between the iPad and the iPad 2 will be great. But some features will inevitably be left out of the 2nd generation model. By design.
Now in its 4th generation, the iPhone followed the same model. My brother’s original model – now obsolete – is in stark contrast to Megan’s iPhone 4. The concept is the same – each iteration an opportunity to prototype & ship new features.
Don’t get stuck in your creative process
When I see struggling creatives – artists, crafters, coaches – it’s because they are often lost in the bells & whistles and never bother to prototype & ship a design that actually allows for feedback.
We get stuck creating ideas and never move into executing products.
It’s not creative if you don’t CREATE something.
Your creative process is not the dreamy mental state that allows new ideas to constantly percolate to the top of your brain.
Your creative process is the one that gets an idea out the door.
I’m just like everyone else. I lose focus in a landscape of great ideas. But when I feel the need to move forward, I look for the mountain.
And I start climbing.
I climb and climb until I can say, “I’ve reached the top.”
I’ve shipped my work. I’ve created something for review. I’ve executed my dream.
That’s where the money is, honey.
You can’t profit from ideas. You profit from execution.
What idea have you waited on because the bells & whistles weren’t ready yet? What design remains untested because you thought you might add more?
What can you ship today instead of tomorrow?
Tara Gentile empowers passionate people to produce & profit. Her latest program, The Art of Action, ships today.
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This particular post really resonates!
When asked one of my worst traits I say “perfectionism” and most people don’t get it.
When I’m trying to achieve the perfect product, someone else launches it. When I over think something I’m losing time. Then I’m left with missed opportunities. It’s hard to get past it but I found that I’m much more alert now and I make myself stop, look at what is achieved and say “It’s good enough”. Perfection can’t be achieved but quality can and that has to be enough. I can keep on adding to the product but if I don’t put out there what’s the point?
Wahoo! I needed this post today! JUST DO IT! Thanks for allowing me 😉
Brilliant post!
Great post. You know, even if I spend a thousand hours making the perfect product today, I’ll want to change something about it next month or next year anyway. So I agree that perfection is overrated… Just pull the trigger on getting your product to market!
You are so right. I’ve wasted decades not putting my work out there because I wanted it to be perfectly finished, perfectly packaged, perfectly promoted, and as a result every good idea I’ve ever had has inevitably been made by others, that’s the nature of things, particularly since blogging came about and I’ve posted old work online or shared it through flickr etc.
When I got M.E. (CFS) a few years ago a lot of my art/craft work stopped because shaky hands meant I couldn’t do draw perfect designs and couldn’t take perfect pictures, couldn’t stitch safely. I got to feeling hopeless about my creative future and even gave up blogging.
This Christmas I decided to make a book of photo’s from a trip to France as a gift for family and friends from the area. I’ve made a lot of books since my active creating has stopped. People seemed to like it and since it didn’t contain images requiring permissions (unlike the others) I thought I may as well offer it for sale on Blurb. I’ve only had 4 sales since it went up last month, hardly groundbreaking stuff, but considering I’m bed bound and able to do very little online (did one mention on my blog) it’s amazing that I sold any. And that’s 4 more sales than I ever got from all the almost perfect things I’ve made that were never put out there.
The feeling of having done SOMETHING is great. Yes, I could have made a better book if I’d had a better camera, if I’d had better software, a faster computer, more energy and better health to go through the 4000 images I took. But would I have ever considered it finished? Probably not. Accepting that something is good enough has been really empowering.
Doing that has inspired me to stop being all perfectionist about my 20yrs worth of previous work. That that the imminent approach of a 40th birthday and all the inevitable reflecting on wasted opportunities that comes with it. So I decided last month, after the 1st book sold, that I’m going to start packaging it all up and finally get something onto my Etsy shop that has sat empty for about 4 years. It won’t be any of the great ideas in my head, it may not even be art/craft work initially (I need to clear out a lot of supplies) but just because something isn’t how I envisioned it doesn’t mean it’s not ideal for someone else. And if I think about it, the things that I most want to buy from other artists and crafters are nearly always they things they consider rejects, test pieces or… prototypes.
I must have over 1000 notebooks that I’ve made over the decades to use up all the bits of paper I obsessively collect. I’ll never draw in all of them so why not sell them to someone who will. And maybe, if I start selling the decades of gathered pieces and supplies that fill my home to the ceiling (and 2 sheds) perhaps I’ll actually have space – literally and mentally, to do fresh new work when I finally am free of this illness. I wouldn’t be surprised if the weight of all these unrealised dreams has contributed to my exhaustion in the first place. My years of saved work is like an enormous breeding 3D To-Do list that has never had any boxes ticked off. Now is the time to stop talking and start ticking.
I wish I’d read your post 20 years ago. It’s the sort of thing I knew in the back of my mind but it always makes it more real, more memorable when someone writes it down and spells it out.
So thank you. You have given me some very timely encouragement to continue the thinking that turning 40 has started and I’m more determined than ever that before the year is out my Etsy store will no longer be full of tumbleweed and echoes.
Thanks for the post. I really think using Apple as a metaphor was a great idea! Of course – they put a product on the market that isn’t “perfect” but will be improved over time! We all knew this – but didn’t allow that thought to register and compare with our own creation. Artists/crafters are always working on ideas, new or old, and should put it all out there (assuming it is ‘good’ work and functions as it should).
Thank you!
Awesome post! I’ve sat on my hands for years now just filling notebooks with all sorts of ideas & talking for hours with my best friends about how awesome fill-in-the-blank would be. I never went forward because I wanted everything to be perfect before I ever launched a product. I wanted the perfect website/store/blog and with that the perfect logo/packaging/branding. I finally just started a blog and I still need to get over the fact that it’s not perfect, but that’s OK! It’s always a work in progress. Thanks so much for this inspiring post!